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Review
Created: December, 1999
Need to design a colorful, eye-catching brochure
for one client, create a compelling video product demonstration
for another and produce some attention-grabbing content to promote
your business's Web site?
If you're looking for a graphics card with the muscle to help
you meet the constantly changing needs of your business, consider
the ATI All-in-Wonder 128. The 16 Mb, AGP, ATI All-in-Wonder
128 graphics card delivers high-resolution and up to 32-bit
(true) color depth that lends vibrant image quality to your
graphic designs, your multi-media presentations and your video
creations.
Colors are clean and text is crisp. 3-D graphics are vigorous
and relatively smooth. Its 16 Mb of (non-upgradeable) memory
and AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) technology (designed by
Intel to directly utilize the CPU for some tasks, speeding up
image processing) work in unison to keep this card moving fast.
The All-in-Wonder 128 comes with Windows 95/98 display and multimedia
drivers, a bundle of on-the-ball ATI software and a user-friendly
and fully supported video-editing program, MGI VideoWave II.
ATI's bundled software (DVD Player, Video CD Player, Video Editor,
TV Player and CD Audio Player) is easy to use and is custom-made
for the graphics card.
ATI set-up wizards help the user to configure the graphics card
for country (to support local video standards), Advanced Power
Management Settings (for Windows 98), resource usage, audio
settings and video capture settings. That means that you'll
get the best possible performance from the interaction of hardware
and software, without having to spend endless hours trying to
configure hardware and software to work in harmony.
The graphics card comes with a co-axial cable connector (for
cable and antenna TV reception), composite video and S-Video
inputs and outputs, and an input box. You can capture and utilize
images and sounds from almost any possible device, be it TV,
a VCR, a video camera or a DVD player.
The All-in-Wonder 128 uses built-in hardware to provide full
frame-rate playback of DVD video. DVD video can be sent to a
monitor or to a TV, and DVD playback quality is relatively good
and stable. Enthusiastic DVD viewers, however, might want to
spring for the next model up, the 32-Mb version of this card.
The built-in TV tuner and TV Player software provide a splendid
set of television viewing features, though admittedly these
have limited (mostly leisure) potential for most small business
operators.
The TV-out feature allows video presentations, still graphics
and text to be displayed on a television screen as easily as
they can be displayed on a computer monitor. This is helpful
for those moments when you'd rather not make your clients crowd
around a monitor in order to view your presentation.
The All-in-Wonder 128 makes available interactive viewing and
communication experiences, such as video-conferencing and the
shared viewing of video through support for applications such
as NetMeeting and WebTV.
This graphics card also comes with video capture features. It
does not offer professional quality, but if you need to capture,
edit and create video for a Web site or a business presentation,
this graphics card will do the job. The Digital VCR allows the
user to choose from a variety of video capture formats, enabling
the most efficient use of the CPU speed and available hard drive
space, by adjusting resolution and frame rates when capturing
video.
Note that if you have an older and slower computer (a low-end
Pentium), you will be frustrated by the limitations of what
you can do with this card.
The video output cables should be longer, and, ideally,
an output box would be as handy as the input box. There should
also be an option to upgrade the memory on the graphics card.
Right now there are two versions, this 16-Mb card and its more
expensive 32-Mb cousin.
Despite those shortcomings, the ATI All-in-Wonder 128 is a dependable
choice for the small business user who needs to do a little
bit of everything. The number of "all-in-one" graphics card
offerings is currently limited, so this multipurpose card has
few challengers.
Reviewer's rating: 4 / 5
Comments: Versatile, reliable and economical graphics card,
suitable for a variety of graphics tasks.
Price: approximately $200 US
Buy it: Amazon.com
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